"All I Want Is You" (you might know it as "that sweet honey bee song," sounds like an old Appalachian folk tune or maybe something John Prine would have written, but it's a kids' song from 1977 by Barry Louis Polisar, an acclaimed singer-songwriter in the genre of children's music.
The song is super catchy, loaded with clever couplets like:
If you were a wink, I'd be a nod
If you were a seed, well, I'd be a pod
If you were the floor, I'd wanna be the rug
And if you were a kiss, I know I'd be a hug
Most of Polisar's songs are what he described to Songfacts as "slightly edgy, funny, satirical pieces" with titles like "I'm a Three-Toed, Triple-Eyed, Double-Jointed Dinosaur" and "My Mother Ran Away Today," but he adds one or two "child-like" love songs on each album, which is how the endearing "All I Want Is You" ended up on his second album, My Brother Thinks He's a Banana and other Provocative Songs for Children.
Barry Louis Polisar wrote the song in 1974 and almost didn't record it. He included it on his 1977 album only because he needed another song. He never performed it, and the song lay dormant until 2007 when it was used in the opening credits of the movie
Juno, a very sweet film about people who help each other out in times of need (helping the main character navigate the stormy waters of a teen pregnancy).
After the song appeared in the film, it rolled downhill, earning lots of cover versions and placements in TV commercials. "I sing the song at almost every concert now,"
Polisar told Songfacts. "Kids in my school concerts love to sing and clap along and I have heard from hundreds of adult fans who have written to tell me they used the song at their wedding celebrations. There is an innocent quality in the song and I guess that accounts for its popularity. It's been recorded by hundreds of other artists - including three wildly different versions on a tribute album of my songs that a fan produced a few years back called
We're Not Kidding! There was even a cover version translated and sung in French by a musician from France."
The song ended up in Juno through pure happenstance. The film's director, Jason Reitman, was searching through iTunes and stumbled on it. Reitman likes to use songs in his title sequences that set the tone for the film; his 2009 movie Up In The Air uses the Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings version of "This Land Is Your Land," for example. When he heard "All I Want Is You," he knew it was right for Juno.
"You have to find a song that powers what the movie's already telling you, that complements it," he told Pitchfork. "With 'All I Want Is You,' there was kind of an innocence to hearing a children's song at the top of the film, because Juno uses teen pregnancy to talk about the idea of growing up too quickly. There was also something kind of delightful about opening with a children's song that maybe the audience hadn't heard before."
"All I Want Is You" is the first song on the
Juno soundtrack, which sold over a million copies and went to #1. Other songs on the soundtrack include "
Anyone Else But You" by The Moldy Peaches and "
Piazza, New York Catcher" by Belle & Sebastian.
Barry Louis Polisar recorded a more polished version of the song for Juno, but director Jason Reitman used the 1977 original, which Barry Louis Polisar calls the "rougher, slightly off-key version," instead.
If you want to get pedantic about the grammar, the opening line, "If I was a flower growing wild and free," would be "If I were a flower growing wild and free."
Barry Louis Polisar chalks this up to the influence of Roger Miller's song "Reincarnation," which goes:
If I was a bird and you was a fish, what would we do
I guess we'd wish for reincarnation
Polisar also cites Bob Dylan's "You Ain't Goin' Nowhere" as an influence on "All I Want Is You."
We have CD Baby founder Derek Sivers to thank for getting this song on iTunes, where Jason Reitman found it. When Barry Louis Polisar called CD Baby in the '90s about distributing his new music, Sivers answered the phone. It turns out he's a fan. Sivers for a time was literally the ringleader of a circus, and he regularly listened to and sang Polisar's songs during this time. He encouraged Barry to digitize his back catalog to CD and waived the setup fees to help out. When music distribution went digital, CD Baby got them on stores like iTunes and later, on streaming services.
"Every time I tried to credit him for being instrumental in that, he deflected the credit," Polisar said. "A real prince of a guy."
Barry Louis Polisar has been performing at schools and libraries since 1975, when he started in the business. He also plays concerts, writes children's books and releases his music on his own label.
In the world of kids' music he built a national following, but songs like "My Brother Threw Up on My Stuffed Toy Bunny" and "Don't Put Your Finger Up Your Nose" caused enough controversy to get him banned from the Anne Arundel County school system in 1991. Many came to his aid, but just a whiff of controversy cost him a lot of gigs.
After Juno brought this song out in the open, he's had a much wider audience. During the pandemic, he shared a new song every day for 180 days.
Companies to use this song in commercials include Adobe, Coca-Cola, Cricket Wireless, Honda and Del Monte. A version by Caroline Says appears in a 2025
commercial for Lay's potato chips that ran during the Super Bowl. In the spot, a young girl nurtures a wayward potato, helping it grow so it can be used to make the chips.
In 2004, three years before
Juno, the movie
Napoleon Dynamite used a similarly jovial, innocent song in the title sequence: "
We're Going To Be Friends" by The White Stripes. That song/movie combination also hit the mark on the overarching theme of friendship.
